SiteGround Hosting Review

SiteGround is one of the established names in the hosting game. With three different data centres spread around the world in Chicago, Amsterdam and Singapore, they offer an extremely high end product for an affordable price. Their corporate philosophy is simple – offer a premium, handcrafted product, and the people will come. It seems to be working out pretty well for them.

SiteGround offers a full range of hosting services, including (but by no means limited to) shared, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, and reseller hosting. For most people though, their shared or cloud options are where it’s at.

All of their basic packages (cloud and shared hosting) include an enhanced cPanel interface, Joomla and WordPress support, almost continuous uptime (99.996%) with their automated server issue detection software, and extremely easy setup. In addition, SiteGround has exemplary customer service, with a string of positive reviews and feedback for their 24/7 customer support, and unlimited MySQL databases.

When it comes to speed, SiteGround is one of the best, offering server space at their datacentres in Chicago, Singapore, and Amsterdam for all of their shared hosting plans. What’s more, they store their MySQL databases on different disks for improved speed and security. However, they are stored on SAS hard disk drives, save for their top tier option, with is stored on SSD.

To further improve speed, they offer custom server setup, they run their servers on Apache on CentOS, they offer CloudFlare CDN, and they’ve developed their own caching service called SuperCacher. SuperCacher works to increase the number of hits a site can handle while decreasing the loading speed. It’s available in three levels, with the more expensive plans utilizing Memcached.

As you move up their pricing tiers, SiteGround customers also get SSL, dynamic caching for faster WordPress and Joomla performance, as well as premium support, more space, more daily backups and free PCI compliance (which has 12 standard requirements).

Cloud, dedicated, reseller
SiteGround isn’t just about shared hosting though. They have a range of other options, including cloud and dedicated and reseller hosting.

Their cloud hosting options start at $54.00 per month and scale all the way up to $126.00 for their Enterprise option. Their cloud option starts with one 3.0GHz CPU, 2BG DDR3 RAM, 20GB of disk space, and 5TB bandwidth. They use Linux containers for SSD disks, they fully manage their servers, they auto-scale resources, so you can handle traffic spikes without rebooting, and they provide daily backups. Plus they have their three datacentres and free CDN for faster service, no matter where your users are. Plus, they offer Git integration for their WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.

A dedicated server in a SiteGround database will set you back $229.00 per month, all the way up to $429.00. The entry dedicated server packages include an Intel i3-540 3.06GHz CPU with a 3.06GHz clock speed, dual cores, 4MB CPU cache, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB SATA II HDD HDD, and 5TB bandwidth. The higher end packages use Intel Xeon E5-2620 CPUs and generally have more stuff, including hexa-core, more RAM, and four 500GB SATA II / RAID 10 HDD.

MySQL

When it comes to SQL, SiteGround is a leader in the field. They offer an unlimited number of both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases that can be managed with phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin. They also have an entire section of their tutorial board dedicated to PHP and MySQL, walking users through the basics of MySQL, how to guides to MySQL creation, removal, backup, and restoration, as well as guides for specific MySQL actions like:

Database table creation

Connecting to the database

Querying the database

Looking at tables in HTML

Accessing your MySQL with a remote server

How to use MySQL GUI tools

Each tutorial provides a detailed walkthrough with lots of screenshots and descriptions, to help even the most novice of developers with their server.

SiteGround also works to help speed up MySQL queries by caching common ones, cleaning freezed MySQL queries, and memory usage tweaks.

1-click staging (create a copy of your live site in a separate window to experiment and play with.)

Conclusion

No matter what sort of hosting option you’re looking for, you’re likely to find a solution at SiteGround, but they are specifically geared for MySQL hosting in a number of ways. They’ve optimized their servers for improved MySQL speed and security, running databases on separate disks. They also provide a huge amount of tutorial information, and their 24/7 MySQL support is second to none. If you’re after a great host who’s going to run your databases extremely well, then SiteGround is a fantastic provider.